Now if you insist that this 25% hike is going to hurt you there are so many things you can do. Firstly you could make a effort to conserve electricity you muppet ! Turn off appliances you aren't using, invest in a gas cooker, put in solar heating or put a timer on your geyser. Those few steps will more than halve yourelectricity bill.

So if it's really about money that you're bitching about and you haven't been doing these things you have no excuse and need to shut the hell up right now.

By now just about everyone knows that an accident at the Duvha power station has taken 600 Mw out of the generating grid and it will stay out for the next 18 months or so. But we are being told it was an accident caused by “unforeseen circumstances.”

That’s not the information I’ve been given. Instead, I understand that the turbine overspeed protection system was being tested. Without getting overly technical, a valve controls the amount of steam entering the turbine. There are three independent protection systems plus a manual system which requires an individual to press an emergency button if things go wrong.

A massive quantity of steam was pumped into the turbine which promptly went berserk. All three protection systems failed. Worse, the individual with his finger on the manual emergency button wasn’t at his post. Result: Big Bang, fire and very expensive mess. Apparently about R3bn to fix (Eskom hasn’t yet formally told us how much); 18 months offline.

Here’s the contrary bit: if something like this happened for an hour at Koeberg, the nuclear powered station in the Western Cape, a radiation alarm would have sounded and the event would be classified on the front pages of the mainstream media as a national crisis. But ‘unforeseen maintenance’ at Duvha takes 600Mw out for 18 months and the media stays shtuum. Hey?

Meanwhile, and just to get you really riled, Business Day carries a story (March 30) to the effect that electricity users might face a further hike in their rates this year – in addition to the 25% already authorised – this time to pay for the rehabilitation of the ageing distribution network. According to EDI Holdings, a government parastatal, its estimate is that the cost of this work will consume about R30bn.

Ompi Aphane, deputy director-general for electricity, nuclear and clean energy, told Bloomberg that it made no sense to invest a trillion in new power stations (that’s a bit of an exaggeration) if you don’t spend another R30bn on the rest of the value chain. Then he rejected Business Day’s story about another hike and said: “The municipalities are already charging a surcharge in addition to the tariff but because it is not earmarked as such, you don’t really know what that money does.”

Well, since he doesn’t know, we can tell him: it is applied on sending officials off on extravagant junkets or on wild parties or on expensive motor cars. In case he dismisses that out of hand, we can provide another example – in Johannesburg it has been used to pay an indolent, inefficient and totally useless organisation a fortune of money to produce a crazy, inept, hopeless and impractical billing system which is going to cost even more millions to repair. And no one will be called to account.

Is there any wonder that ordinary folk who go about their daily business and apply themselves honestly, are so angry? Municipal elections are being held in May. This is an opportunity for citizens to vote out of power those who have served them poorly. But that’s an unlikely outcome. Instead, the majority will continue to vote with their racial predilections to the fore. They shouldn’t complain, and certainly shouldn’t set fire to tyres and generally go on rampages, when the people they keep on electing keep on defrauding them.

Seriously Rooster, an electricity price hike of 25% this year, another one of 25% next year, and another of 25% the year thereafter, makes nonsense of economic growth. Everyone may have access to electricity in future, but who will be able to afford it? The South African Chamber of Commerce predicts job losses of 250,000 with this latest increase, and that's just for starters.

Welcome to planet earth buddy. It's emotionally unintelligent to worry about this inevitable state of affairs. One day when you're big and all your naive and childish notions of the world of politics world wide are dead, you'll get it.

This makes me think of when was in university protesting bush stealing the election from gore. Oh how I still believed in "goodies and baddies". I even got on the wholke "Vote nader" michael moore bus. What a noob I was. They're all the same. It's a wonderful trick they use. The truth is so awful and in your face that the human mind rejects it. But once you do it's so obvious what's going on. Sociopaths naturally rise to the top in politics or are attracted to it in the first place. I thank god everyday for our dumb government happy to just drive some bling sedan rather than come up with anything really machiovelian and clever to really fuck us over for BIG money.

Seriously Rooster, an electricity price hike of 25% this year, another one of 25% next year, and another of 25% the year thereafter, makes nonsense of economic growth. Everyone may have access to electricity in future, but who will be able to afford it? The South African Chamber of Commerce predicts job losses of 250,000 with this latest increase, and that's just for starters.

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Firstly this is already the second increase and the next and last one is next year. After that the funding for the new and cheaper power stations should be complete and the problem will go away. Evfery developing country in the world agrees the path to moving forward is through pumping masses of cash into infrastructure. Roads and power stations and railways etc cost more in the short term but save you masses in the long run. China is doing what we are doing , so is India and Brazil and russia. Good enough for them it ought to be good enough for us.

Meh. In the big relative scheme they havent even taken the small change out of our pockets. I'm not defending corruption in South Africa, I'm just saying it's small fry.

I lives most of my young 20's under prime minister Taksin of Thailand. The corruption under him was something truly majestic to behold. So was the populism. The A.N.c are extremely amateur and small time compared. So are the Thai police millions of times more corrupt that ours. The whole country is run by a mafia and you know what ? Even there I didn't care.Great place. So relatively "crisp and clean" South Africa is hardly going to make me shrug.

No Rooster, the last price increase will not take place next year. There will be 25% increases for the next three years, and after that the price is not likely to go down.

Eskom has indicated that it will be asking for further 25% increases for each of 2013 and 2014, which are the first two years of the next multi-year price determination, MYPD3. The compounded average electricity price from Eskom will have increased by more than five times in the seven year period from April 1 2008 and April 1 2014.

Eskom has indicated that thereafter, from 2015, we can expect electricity price increases generally in line with inflation.

Datchshund, the three years of increasing started over a year ago . We had increase one and this was now increase two. That's the funny thing about the perception of time in the third dimensional lumpy space, it moves !!

By the way, the municipal price only goes up from 1 July, but there will be extra charges over and above the 25% increase for the municipalities to get their slice.

The more you buy, the more you will be charged. That's why you get one of those plastic ID's so the municipalities can keep track of your consumption on a prepaid meter. Small businesses will be hit the worst. This begs the question, where will we find an affordable energy source? Certainly not from crackpot technologies like wind turbines or solar energy. (You will now get comments from crackpots who believe wind turbines and solar energy make a significant contribution.)

"The price hike will affect customers located in Eskom communities only. Homes and businesses that purchase their power from the various municipalities across the country, however, will only feel the effect of the price increase after July 1 when the municipal price adjustments are due.

"Since April 1 2008, electricity consumers have felt the effects of price increases, which when compounded including Friday’s hike, constitute an average 260% increase.

"And that average increase is scaled according to a complex and varied tariff structure which, while difficult for households and small businesses to source and digest, basically sees those who use less electricity, such as the poor, incur a proportionately lower increase to their electricity bill.

"As Joffe notes, when taking into account the inclining block tariff, “the effect is, on average, tariffs for Eskom residential customers [who tend to come from poorer areas] will be going up by roughly 14% whereas for large customers the increase would be much more than that”."